Mika Heinonen's Blog
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SuperDomino 8
Tuesday, 16 October 2007 20:15:52 EET


Today I started to install the hardware for the upcoming Domino 8 & DB/2 9.1 server.

The IBM x3650 (rack version) was amazingly quick and easy to install. All parts are easily snapped in with no need for any tools except your hands.

The configuration consisted of the following parts:

  • IBM x3650 with 1 Intel Quad Core Xeon E5335 2.0GHz 8MB cache and 2x 1GB self-correcting RAM
  • a second Intel Quad Core Xeon E5335 2.0GHz 8MB cache
  • a second power supply with 5 more fans
  • 2x 1GB self-correcting RAM
  • 2x 2GB self-correcting RAM
  • 2x 73GB SAS harddisks for drive C: with RAID 1
  • 4x 146GB SAS harddisks for drive D: with RAID 5
  • IBM ServeRaid 8k card with battery backup (if both power supplies go down, it still keeps the harddisks up to perform a clean shutdown in order to avoid file system corruption)

    So the complete server looks like this:
  • 2 Intel Quad Core Xeons E5335 2.0GHz 8MB cache
  • 8GB self-correcting RAM
  • 73GB Drive C: RAID 1
  • 438GB Drive D: RAID 5
  • 2 Power Supplies
  • 10 fans (+2 fans for the Power Supplies)

    I booted up the ServeRaid Support CD, which started Linux with X-Windows and created the raid arrays: RAID 1 for drive C: so one disk can go down and data is still available on the other, and RAID 5 (with 256K stripe-unit size, I guess that's the optimal for this purpose and hardware) for drive D: because I need 250GB free space, and RAID 6 is really only recommended for raid arrays with 12 or more harddisks.

    I'm still not sure if I should allocate a 4GB RAM disk for the Transaction Log, or put it in the C:\LOGDIR directory (C: drive has basically no activity if you make the Windows pagefile min=max=windows recommended size (which is about 1.5 times RAM)). Making a seperate partition for it wouldn't help much, since it's using the same physical harddisks.

    Tomorrow I will install Windows 2003 64-bit Enterprise Server, Domino 8 (unfortunately only 32-bit, since the 64-bit Domino 8.0.1 is not out yet), and get an IBM guy to install DB/2 9.1 64-bit on it via Remote Desktop.

    Next week I'll have a workshop with IBM so we can test Domino 8 using DB/2 9.1 thoroughly, and see how it performs on huge databases with lots of transactional traffic.

    • Adam Fenstermaker
    1 Tuesday, 16 October 2007 22:42:34 EET
    Mika -

    Following your progress as we are considering doing some similar testing later this year. Maybe I misunderstood - but re: transaction log. I think IBM's recommendation is to put transaction log on its own set of RAID 1 disks or not do it at all (not shared with operating system) - otherwise enormous amt of disk traffic slows down the whole server. Putting it on RAM Disk would be bad as well - since if server goes down this would mean data loss.

    Mika
    2 Tuesday, 16 October 2007 23:14:30 EET
    Yeah, normally I also put the Transactional Log on a seperate physical harddrive, or seperate glassfiber network storage (not sure how it's exactly called, but it's very fast: 3GB per sec).

    Well, I could configure this server also to have a 3 harddisk RAID 5, and use one 146GB harddisk as non-raid Transactional Log drive. That would be the best regarding the recommendations of how to use a transactional log. Although this non-raid 146GB harddisk would have lots of spare room, I could put some non-changing non-important files on it, like Setup files. I will think about it.

    I still want to try the 4GB RAM drive idea also, since from my experience, using the temp directory on RAM drive in Windows, would also speed up the performance of Domino a lot. The server is in a IBM server hotel which has diesel driven UPS (made by ABB coincidentally), so a power outage is almost impossible. The RAM drive technology would also involve a startup and shutdown script which copies the 4GB files back to a harddrive before the OS is rebooted (should take max 2 seconds). It's also possible to use a seperate RAM battery backup card, like it was standard in Amiga computers. This would speed up the startup/shutdown and bring additional backup security.

    Henning
    3 Sunday, 21 October 2007 20:51:42 EET
    I hope that you never rely on the RAID battery to keep your harddrives up because this will probably not work. The battery stores what is actually in the controllers write cache but not yet written to your disks. So in case of a power failure the RAID controller will try to sync its cache with disks as soon as they go up again.
    Yes, in German you would call me Klugscheisser.

    Adam Fenstermaker
    4 Thursday, 29 November 2007 15:58:52 EET
    Mika -

    Wondering how performance testing went on NSFDB2. Are you going to post results on your blog?

    Werner Herzog
    5 Tuesday, 04 December 2007 16:17:42 EET
    Mika,
    some results would be interesting for me too?

    Mika
    6 Thursday, 06 December 2007 03:22:32 EET
    Yes, I have some test results. It doesn't look very good on the web, but it works: http://www.logc.abb.fi/statim/presentations.nsf/15ff0bc8d306557bc225737e006d894b?OpenView
    The test was done on a IBM xSeries x3650, 2x Quad Core 2.0GHz, 8GB RAM, Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 x64, Domino 8.0 x32, DB/2 9.1 x64.
    I will redo the tests in January 2008 on a IBM pSeries server on Domino 8.1 and DB/2 9.5.

    Adam Fenstermaker
    7 Friday, 07 December 2007 22:28:26 EET
    Interesting. So to sum it up - Are you going to use NSFDB2, for what, and why / why not?

    Mika
    8 Saturday, 08 December 2007 00:24:36 EET
    I'm going to use DB/2 for large databases with millions of documents and frequent changes, so that View Indexing will be faster.

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    9 Thursday, 24 July 2008 22:36:23 EET
    Nice blog

    http://www.google.com/notebook/public/08249454177045954012/BDSMKQgoQmu_ikrQj